Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

"It is never too late to give up our prejudices."
—Walden

"It is a great art to saunter."
—journal

"Nothing is so much to be feared as fear."
—journal

"Fire is the most tolerable third party."
—journal

"That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."
—journal

"It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak, and another to hear."
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

"My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it."
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."
—Walden

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
—Walden

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."
—Walden

"Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society."
—Walden

"Our life is frittered away by detail . . . Simplicity, simplicity."
—Walden

"It is not of so much importance to inquire of a man what actions he performed at one and what at another period of his life, as what manner of man he was at every period."
— quoted in Henry David Thoreau: What Manner of Man? by Edward Wagenknecht

about Henry David Thoreau

My first introduction to Thoreau's writings was, I think, in 1907, or later, when I was in the thick of the passive resistance struggle. A friend sent me the essay on 'Civil Disobedience.' It left a deep impression upon me. I translated a portion for the readers of 'Indian Opinion in South Africa,' which I was then editing, and I made copious extracts for the English part of that paper. The essay seemed to be so convincing and truthful that I felt the need of knowing more of Thoreau, and I came across your Life of him, his ' Walden,' and other shorter essays, all of which I read with great pleasure and equal profit. — Ghandi

quoted in Walter Harding, ed., Thoreau: A Century of Criticism (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1954) 147, Questia, 16 Nov. 2005 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=8776947.

Sources for Quotations

I use various sources for quotations on this site. Below are the most common sources I use. I also draw from my own collection of quotes and from primary sources.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition. John Bartlett, Justin Kaplan, editors. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1992.

BrainyQuote. <http://www.brainyquote.com/>

The Dictionary of Biographical Quotation. Richard Kenin and Justin Wintle, editors. Dorset Press, New York, 1978

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, fourth edition. Angela Partington, editor. Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 1992

Peter's Quotations by Laurence J. Peter. Bantam Books, New York, 1980

The Quotations Page. <http://www.quotationspage.com/>